Friday, 30 December 2016

Severed; A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found - Frances Larson (Granta books, £9.99)

I
have always thought of myself as more than averagely morbid, as you might
expect from the author of a cemetery blog, but Frances Larson’s ‘Severed’ made me think that I’m not,
perhaps, as morbid as I had fondly imagined myself to be. For one thing I had
never given much thought to the cultural significance of severed heads. And
secondly, unlike 30 million American adults, I have never watched, or even felt
the inclination to watch, an on-line video of an Isis execution. Larson reveals
that a survey conducted 5 months after the execution by beheading of US
engineer Nick Berg in May 2004 found that 24% of all American adult internet
users had watched on-line videos of his death, posted by his executioners, in
May and June that year. “The Berg beheading footage remained the most popular internet
search in the United States for a week,” Larson tells us, and “the second most
popular throughout the month of May, runner up only to ‘American Idol’”. Until
I googled ‘beheading’, looking for some tasteful 18th century etching or engravings
of an execution to illustrate this post with, I had not realised how popular
Isis executions were on the web. I was shocked to see hundreds of images of
orange jump suited victims kneeling before their scimitar wielding
executioners, or artfully posed, post decapitation, with severed head resting
in the small of the back of the now headless torso. Seeing still images was bad
enough, I am far too squeamish to want to witness the suffering and death of a
fellow human being.

Oxford
based anthropologist Frances Larson has written other books on the history of
the Pitt Rivers Museum and of pioneering medic Henry Wellcome. ‘Severed’
, her third book, is an excellently written account of the various causes of heads
getting sliced off at the neck covering, as you would expect, executions and dissections,
but also containing fascinating chapters on shrunken heads, trophy heads,
framed heads and potent heads. Her prologue is an account of the peripatetic fate
of Oliver Cromwell’s dead head but her most interesting chapter is on the
lively late colonial trade in shrunken heads many of which turn out to be fakes
produced by indigenous craftsman to supply the lucrative trade in trophy heads generated
by western travellers, colonisers and tourists. “Of the ten shrunken heads on
display at the Pitt Rivers Museum, two are sloth heads, two are howler monkey
heads, and of the six remaining human heads, three are ‘fakes’, made for sale,”
Larson says, which “tell of the nameless dead, the impoverished and outcast
who, after their deaths, became the victims of an international trade in exotic
collectibles that had little to do with the indigenous beliefs of the
inhabitants of the Amazon jungle.”

Larson
also deals with the taking of trophy heads in war, discussing in detail documented
examples during the second world war of American’s taking Japanese skulls as
souvenirs or using them as decorations on their jeeps or other vehicles including
the famous Life Magazine picture of the week from May 1944 showing Natalie
Nickerson, a Phoenix war worker, in the act of writing to her boyfriend serving
in the far east, thanking him for the present of a Japanese soldier’s skull which
she contemplates as she writes. The photo caused no outcry in the States but
was greeted with horror in Japan. Trophy skulls were not taken by US soldiers
in the European campaign. These examples, along with the Isis videos, shatter
any illusions we have of moral progress over the last few hundred years. Beheadings
and guillotining are not relics of a past that we have left behind us, scratch
the surface of the average modern suburban American or European and a member of
the mob that eagerly turned out at Tyburn on execution day is easy to see.
Larson’s book is highly recommended.

Life magazines picture of the week in May 1944 caused outrage in Japan